
The Sleeping Project: Valet, 2000. Wood, 70 x 18 x 27 in.

The Shrine Project, 2000. Mixed media, interactive installation
installed at the Taipei Biennial.

The Sleeping Project, 2000. Mixed Media, interactive installation.

The Letter-Writing Project, 1998. Wood, glass and paper, 114 x 67 x
91 in. Interactive installation at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

The Living Room. 2000. Mixed media installation at the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum.
All photo credits courtesy of Lombard Freid Fine Arts. |
Lee Mingwei:
Sharing Experience
from Sculpture
Magazine, March 2002
By Carolee Thea
The condition of being in a world of accelerated time,
of emergent technologies, of actual or fictional reality, of local
and global inputs has overloaded and undermined our subjective relations.
Consequently we experience a distancing from the real, a distancing
from self and from others. Some artists have developed modes of engaging
the viewer that depart from traditional straight forward politics
of "visibility." They often include spaces for performance
in which audiences can respond to concepts underlying the exhibition
sites for staging participants' desires and discomforts, along with
the problematics of a moment not yet named within the culture.
Born in 1964, the Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei creates situation
apparatuses where both the artist and participants, through invention,play,
and transformation, may together produce affect and meaning that
touch on personal and interpersonal relations. As in Kaprow’s
Happenings, His work is strongly rooted in an understanding of the
importance of breaking down the boundaries that exist between art
and life. But it is also based on spiritual and intimate interactions
between people in private communication. Lee’s work enables
the participant to bypass his/her predetermined designations and
mediations while subtly suggesting a more expansive model for communicating.
Lee Ming Wei grew up under the training of a Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist
monk, within a discipline whose core teaching emphasizes the transitory
nature of the material world. He received his BFA in 1993 at the
California College of Arts and Crafts with honors in textile design
and earned an MFA in sculpture at the Yale School of Fine Arts in
1997. Even his student work combined strategies of interactions within
a constructed scenario. While still at CCAC, he created his first
interactive work. Through photographic documentation, Money for Art
tracks the cycle of nine small sculptures the artist made by folding
$10 bills while at a cafe. Making sculpture was a significant component
of Lee’s work during this period, and his discovery of art
as a currency of exchange through this project marked a significant
shift in his practice as an artist -- from private to public.
In 1997, InteractExchang --The Dining Project, his first project
at the Lombard Fried Gallery, traveled to the Whitney Museum. There,
each evening, Lee invited a different museum visitor, chosen at random
through a lottery system, to dine with him. He prepared an Asian
meal,and both he and his guest were seated on a specially created
dining platform. During the meal, he engaged the guest in conversation
and recorded the exchanges, which were then replayed quietly as hushed
and abstracted background sounds. At the Whitney he also produced
The Letter-writing Project, in which he invited a visitor to enter
one of two booths and write a letter he or she had been meaning to
write--as a way of exploring gratitude, insight, or forgiveness.
The letters were either mailed or left for others to read. This project
was repeated in 1998 at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. At the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in June 1999, the artist created
The Living Room, whose basis was hospitality and collecting. Lee
wanted to offer museum visitors the hospitality which was once a
part of this house -- with staff, members, and others intimately
connected to the museum taking on Mrs Gardner’s role as host
in a specially created living room within the museum.
For the Taipei Biennial in September 2000, Mingwei created The Shrine
Project, in which he constructed seven elevated shrines and then
placed them in a circle. Each week, he invited seven participants
to display their own "sacred objects" on the translucent
glass platform of the shrines. Visitors were able to ascend and contemplate
the meaning of the sacred ----however they might conceive of or experience
it in their lives and the lives of others.
In November 2000, at the Lombard Fried gallery in Chelsea, I was
given the chance to participate in Lee’s Sleeping Project.
In this piece, he completely transformed the gallery space into a
dormitory-like setting, with two elongated beds on wheels and 18
night stands, one for each participant enlisted to sleep in the gallery
with the artist. The monastic spareness of the space and the repeated
elements reminded me of Brancusi’s modules in Endless Column
or Alley of Chairs in Targu Jiu. Lee’ss work entails the deconstruction
of expectations and attempts to rearrange the artwork/viewer relationship
through an experience of sharing. Yet Sleeping Project went beyond
expectations and tested the artist’s endurance and trust more
than any of his other projects, since the 18 intimately sequential
and vulnerable meetings were unique and idiosyncratic. The instructions
were simple: to arrive at 9 p.m., interact or not with the artist,
sleep over, and bring objects to leave on display on a night table
for the duration of the exhibition.The gallery was now a place where
viewer and viewed were significantly transformed. Two elongated beds
on wheels and night stands were present not only to be observed but
to be activated by our experience. Lee’s night stand was neat,
with things that offered initial fodder for conversation, for example
a picture of his grandmother 1920 medical school graduating class
in China. For the artist, sharing is at the very core of his social
dialogue with the Western community. His work, like an "object
of exchange," telescopes one action or event into another. With
the participants, he projects a timeless continuity while subtly
deconstructing the frames of our existing expectations. We talked,
exchanged histories, danced, listened to music, ate almonds, drank
mineral water, changed for bed, and slept. Two weeks later, before
the Sleeping Project was dismantled, I returned to view the installation.
The 18 nightstands, now set around the perimeter of the gallery,
had each become the simulacrum of a persona in a story; like a three-dimensional
scroll, they collaborated to tell a larger story that transcended
any one episode.
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